Disclaimer 1: I do not own Criminal Minds.
Disclaimer 2: I do not own Caltech, although I did go to college there. All characters are fictional, regardless of how much they may resemble actual persons.
Author's Note: The format of this story is unusual. It alternates between 1994-1995 and 2010. I hope the weird format doesn't bother people too much, since I've already got a bunch of chapters written and plan to update regularly. I just need to proofread the chapters before I add them to the story.
Some of the chapters contain quite a bit of nerd speak, but I reserve the right to nerd speak as much as I want in a story about my favorite TV nerds. Nerd speak clarifications may be found at the end of each chapter.
This is my first ever fanfiction. Reading &/ Reviewing are much appreciated. Enjoy!
Chapter 1
August 1994
Penelope Garcia strolled over the worn bricks of the Olive Walk, waiting for her parents and brothers to arrive. She glanced down every now and then to avoid stepping on the sticky olives that dropped out of the gray-green leaves above.
The only person she had seen all morning had been a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who had asked her for directions to the Student Activities Center. She had pointed out the door to the basement of the South Houses where the SAC was located, and he had thanked her with a nervous little smile and an awkward little wave.
Penelope checked her watch for the third time in five minutes. It was 11:00 AM. Her family should have been here an hour ago.
They had driven down from SF to visit her. They were staying at a hotel in downtown LA. Even with SoCal traffic, it shouldn't have taken them this long to drive to Pasadena.
Penelope smiled as she conjured up a visual of her family driving down the freeway. Her stepdad, Rick, would be driving his neon green convertible - the "Mid-Life-Crisis-Avertible". Her mom, Phoebe, would be riding shotgun, trying to convince her stepdad to close the roof so they could turn on the air-conditioning. Her oldest brother, Josh, would be driving his Hippiemobile. He would let Marcos ride up front with him and banish the two sixteen-year-olds, Jonathan and Alejandro, to the back.
Josh, Jonathan, and Penelope were Phoebe's kids from her first marriage. Marcos and Alejandro were Rick's kids from his first marriage. Penelope thought of her family as a significantly less sane but substantially more interracial version of the Brady Bunch.
The family was visiting her at Caltech because she wasn't going home for the summer. After finishing her freshman year in June, Penelope had joined the summer research program and started working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
She worked for Dr. Tracy Schmidt, a JPL scientist who led one of many teams on the Galileo mission. The Galileo spacecraft was en route to Jupiter and not scheduled to arrive until late next year, but it had been in perfect position to observe the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in July. It was the first time that modern science had ever witnessed the collision of a comet with a planet.
As an astronomy major, Penelope was thrilled. She was right in the thick of the action. She had gushed about it on the phone to her parents every week, then everyday after the impacts had started in mid-July.
It was now mid-August, and the JPL team was immersed in a detailed analysis of the impact data. Dr. Schmidt wanted to calculate the temperature, energy, and size of fireballs created by the impacts of multiple comet fragments upon Jupiter's atmosphere.
Penelope wanted to learn more about data analysis in astronomy. She was working on algorithms for separating signal from noise that would allow the team to document small fireballs near Galileo's limits of detection. She planned to spend the rest of the summer implementing the algorithms as code and testing them out on the mountains of data from Galileo.
"About time," muttered Penelope, as she spotted Marcos crossing the lawn in front of the Athenaeum. He was followed by a police officer. There was no sign of her parents or other brothers. He turned around to say something to the police officer.
Penelope shivered involuntarily in the ninety-five-degree heat.
Spencer Reid entered a combination into the door that the girl on the Olive Walk had pointed out to him. He wondered if he should have introduced himself.
"Wasn't it appropriate to introduce oneself to one's fellow students?" he pondered. "But what if one's fellow students didn't really wish to know oneself?" he considered.
He had been a little flustered about approaching a pretty blonde girl to ask for directions in the first place, but he had seen no way around it because the Student Activities Center wasn't shown on any maps of campus.
Spencer pursed his lips with a sigh as he jogged down a flight of stairs into the featureless interior of the SAC. The blissful cold within distracted him from his misgivings. Having grown up in Las Vegas, Spencer was used to heat, but he was also used to air-conditioning. He had woken up twenty minutes ago in a sweaty daze, stepped out of bed, and fallen through the six feet of air between his bunk bed and the floor.
The SAC was empty, as was every other location within or near the Student Houses. Anyone who had not gone home for the summer was still asleep.
Spencer had arrived at Caltech a month early because his academic advisor, Professor Michelson, had suggested it. What Professor Michelson didn't say was that a twelve-year-old child prodigy on his first trip away from home would need to adjust to life on his own before the Fall Term started in September. What Professor Michelson didn't know was that Spencer Reid had been living on his own wits for the past three years, ever since his father had left him alone with his schizophrenic mother.
Diana's best friend and former colleague, Anne, had escorted Spencer to Caltech and helped him move into his room in Ricketts House. Spencer had asked Anne to check on his mother every week while he was away at college. She had promised him and hugged him tightly before leaving.
Spencer walked down the white hallway, jiggling the handles on all the white doors.
The first door that opened led to a large bunker-like room adorned with graffiti on the walls and littered with bottles of spray paint on the floor. At the end of the room was a more dilapidated door bearing a metal sign that read "Unauthorized Personnel Only". Spencer tried the door.
It opened onto a maze of pipes lit by bare bulbs hanging from a low ceiling. It was warm, humid, and musty.
Spencer recognized it as a steam tunnel.
The guy down the hall in Ricketts House had told him to look in the steam tunnels under the SAC for a stash of ladders. Spencer hadn't gotten a chance to ask where exactly the SAC, the steam tunnels, or the ladders were located before the guy had disappeared into the computer lab, the only air-conditioned room in Ricketts House.
Spencer needed a ladder to climb into and out of bed.
The steam tunnels were dark and creepy. Pipes and cables of all sizes lined the walls, ceiling, and floor. Steam hissed out of joints in some of the pipes, and water dripped out of leaks in others. Fans whirred in unseen corners.
Spencer backed away from the entrance. He really didn't want to go in there.
This was exactly the sort of setting that would send his mother into an episode of frenzied paranoia. She would scream at him to get away from the pipes. She would warn him about the mutant amphibious creature that Caltech bioengineers were designing for the military. It was going to tear through one of the pipes, attach its suckers to his shoulder, and paw at his face with its slimy webbed fingers.
Spencer shuddered. "Stop being a baby," he thought. "It's just a tunnel," he thought. "I can do this," he thought, "I'm not weak, remember?"
He decided to walk to the end of the tunnel to see if there were any ladders and to come right back if there weren't any.
He stepped slowly into the corridor. He bumped into a pile of bricks blocking his path. He used one of the bricks as a doorstop to keep his escape route open.
"No one knows where I am," he thought. "What if neither the guy down the hall or the girl on the Olive Walk remember me? I knew I should have introduced myself!"
He imagined newspaper headlines proclaiming "Boy Genius Disappears From Caltech: Work of the Campus Creeper?"
The Campus Creeper was a serial kidnapper who abducted students from small colleges all over Southern California, drove them out to the desert, and left them there to die of exposure. Two years had passed since the last confirmed abduction, but the Campus Creeper had taken breaks before only to resume his activities years later.
Spencer winced as he recalled the state of his room. There were signs of struggle where he had rolled over piles of boxes and books. There were traces of blood where he had scraped his knee on the carpet. He deeply regretted falling out of bed that morning.
The FBI would get involved, maybe even the profilers from the Behavioral Analysis Unit. They would send search parties into the desert. No one would look in the steam tunnels. Months later, one of the workers from Physical Plant would find the decomposing corpse of Spencer Reid wedged in a crevice between two pipes. Cause of death: Asphyxiation...Spencer stopped himself. Tangents of this type should only be entertained under the mid-day sun.
He journeyed onwards down the corridor.
He stepped over a pipe at knee-height. He ducked under a pipe at chest-height. He tripped over a bundle of cables that crossed his path underfoot.
A wide passage appeared on his right. There were no lights in the passage, but he could make out several elongated shapes leaning against the wall halfway down.
He entered the murky passage, making a beeline for the wall to his left. He tugged at a cobwebbed jumble while holding his breath. The entire collection tumbled down sideways as he freed a long wooden ladder from its grasp. He swung the ladder under his arm and sprinted back into the relative brightness of the pipe-lined tunnel.
Five minutes later, Spencer was in his room propping his ladder against his bed. He grinned, pleased with himself. Problem solved. QED.
He decided to take a cold shower and change into clean clothes. Then, he'd have Cheerios for lunch and read a few books at the campus bookstore. If it was still sweltering hot after dinner, he'd spend the rest of the evening practicing magic tricks in the computer lab.
He clipped a small Maglite onto his keychain. He thought he'd visit the steam tunnels again tomorrow.
The journey back with the ladder had taken all of two minutes. It was a trick of the mind that venturing into unknown territory always seemed to take ten times as long as returning through known territory. The steam tunnels were dark and creepy, and there was always that mutant amphibious creature to keep in the back of one's head, but there was something appealing about them too. Spencer had a lot of free time in the next month. He decided to explore every inch of the steam tunnels before school started in September.
He would be turning thirteen in October. Thirteen was way too old to still be afraid of the dark.
Nerd speak clarifications
1) Galileo/Jupiter/Comet Shoemaker-Levy
Comet Shoemaker-Levy was a real comet that crashed into Jupiter in July 1994. It was discovered by famous astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene Shoemaker, and David Levy at the Palomar Observatory, owned and operated by Caltech in the mountains north of San Diego. The comet broke up under Jupiter's gravitational forces, and the fragments fell into Jupiter's atmosphere, creating many fireballs that were observed by the unmanned Galileo spacecraft, 150 million miles from its rendezvous with Jupiter. Galileo reached Jupiter in December 1995 and continued its glorious mission, making many important discoveries about the Jovian system, until NASA sent it crashing into Jupiter's atmosphere in September 2003. It will be remembered and beloved for as long as its namesake, Galileo Galilei, the most famous astronomer of them all.
2) Steam tunnels
Steam tunnels are underground passageways containing all the pipes, cables, fans, and machines that operate the buildings above. Ladders connect the multiple levels of the steam tunnels. Some of the sections are completely dark. Holes in the wall lead to huge caverns or additional passageways that you can only skooch through on your back. The tunnels extend all over campus, with exits into most of the buildings. They are completely accessible to Caltech students, some of whom prefer to travel through the tunnels exclusively, for fear of seeing the dreaded yellow face of the sun.
3) QED
Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Latin meaning "that which was to be demonstrated". Traditionally written at the end of mathematical proofs. Written by nerds at the end of everything. For example, "I pooped. QED."